Education reporter

A group of Jackson and Northern Clarke County citizens recently banded together to try and halt a massive development proposed for a Jackson County tract of land about a mile north of Clarke County on U.S. Highway 129.

Already, about 700 acres of the property was the subject of a land-use battle in 2008, when Jackson County planners rejected designs to build a 7.5 million-square-foot industrial park on mostly farm and pasture land near Crooked Creek and Mary Collier roads. If approved, the park would have been one of the 10 largest industrial sites in Georgia.

Property owners later sold the site to a Canadian land-banking company called the Walton Group, which now has proposed an industrial park of 8.9 million square feet on 813 acres, including 5 million square feet of manufacturing space, about 3.4 million square feet of warehouse space and more than 500,000 square feet of commercial space, according to documents the company filed with the Northeast Georgia Regional Development Commission (RDC).

The planned development, GlenRidge Park, is so large it is considered a “Development of Regional Impact,” affecting people in other communities outside Jackson County, namely Clarke County.

An RDC panel in 2008 recommended against the smaller development, saying it would have a bad effect on traffic and water quality in the area and run counter to the area’s existing land uses, mainly agricultural, forest and residential.

The GlenRidge project also would mean four new traffic lights on a mile-long stretch of U.S. Highway 29, said Chuck Murphy, a member of a loosely organized group called Protect Jackson County.

According to Walton’s proposal, the development might eventually add more than 5,700 vehicles to traffic during rush hour. The project would need about 780,000 gallons of water per day, planners estimate.

Murphy’s group is gearing up to oppose the plan, which is just now beginning to work its way through the Jackson County land planning process. Eventually, the proposal will have to come up for a vote before the county’s planning commission as well as the county commission.

The first step is the company’s request for a change in the county’s land-use map, a part of Jackson County’s 2010 plan for comprehensive development. According to the map of future land use, the tract in question is slated to remain rural, Murphy said.

He and others in his group question whether Jackson County needs the project at all, much less in this particular place. The county already has some 3.4 million square feet of industrial and warehouse space available for companies, along with enough land zoned for industrial uses to last into the next century, Murphy said.

Residents also don’t know just what kind of businesses would come to the area.

Walton historically has operated as a land bank, putting together parcels of land and selling small shares of it to many individual investors before getting the land rezoned and then selling out at a higher price to another company before any development actually begins, according to the Protect Jackson County group.

“The only way this model is going to work is to buy farm land where the county says we want to keep farm land,” Murphy said.

The company also has bought large tracts of land in Barrow and Hall counties as well as elsewhere in Jackson County.

A proposed Walton residential development called Arcade Meadows, also in Jackson County, lists more than 1,000 part-owners, mostly Asians who invested small sums of $10,000, $20,000 or a little more, according to County tax records.